Over the past decades, taking care of Earth's environment has become a bigger issue. The film WALL-E brings up this issue about future impacts to our environment. The movie's scenario is about a world filled with tons of trash. This scenario is implying that the world went through an era of intense consumerism. There is a website called Story of Stuff, http://storyofstuff.org/. This website shows videos about America's consumerism economy. That part of this "story" I want to talk about it the ending as trash is created and how it affects our environment.
Being an environmental science major, I've had a glimpse of issues such as waste management. Typically waste today is placed in a landfill or burned. The movie's scenario gives it a future perspective. Besides the issue of waste management, an issue related to waste management is over-population. According to worldmeters.org, the world's population is expected to grow to 9 billion by 2040. WALL-E takes place hundreds of years into the future. I could not imagine what the world's population would be at that time. It is relative that increased population leads to increased consumption and that leads to increased waste on the land.
The film captured on what future Earth could become. There was no water in sight along with constant sandstorms. With a largely populated planet, water shortages are expected. Earth only has limited space. If Earth's population would continue to grow at an exponential rate, there would be little room for living and even placing waste. The film could very well be spot on about there being waste in the streets. As the years go on more waste will pile up and continue piling up. In the film, humans moved away from Earth so the process of cleaning up the waste can begin but in my opinion it would have to happen anyways because of the lack of space that Earth could provide for that many people. The film was a sign to me that space exploration is important if the human race would like to continue growing in numbers.
But back to waste management, what is the best solution to dealing with all of that trash. It seems logical like in the film, to compact the trash into something smaller and stack them up to save space. It is optimistic for human's to return to Earth but their way of life would need to change. Humans would need to end their dependence on buying more and more stuff. It would only lead to more trash piling up on Earth. Another issue could be how many resources humans would use to create so much waste, more importantly plastics and other products that use non-renewable resources. Recycling is important but not enough on a large scale. Another alternative to waste management is to send trash out to space but energy is needed for that and satellites could be affected. In my opinion the best solution is to conserve products and not be as much of a consumer society.
I like how you talked about the environmental factors embedded in the film. When I first watched the film, I did notice the vast amount of waste and trash there was on earth, even in space, but the issues you have brought up about the environment in detail surprised me. Earth was over-populated and too destroyed for people to actually live there, therefore, they go to space. Even the buildings were made of waste! Sometimes I wonder that too much waste will send humans to space, but who knows. But, Wall-E is the true hero here because he goes out of his way to clean the waste to hopefully attract the humans to come back and live on earth again, which in the end, they do. We, as humans, need to be like Wall-E. We all need to partake in bettering our environment and hopefully, the concerns and issues we have will decrease. But, I do think that in today’s society, we have come along greatly in regards to taking care of our environment.
ReplyDeleteI think you have an interesting perspective on the film. I mean, yes its obvious that there is trash everywhere in the environment--on the ground, in the atmosphere, etc. The writers of the film obviously wanted to make the analogy to American consumerism (by only showing a part of the US). And I think that they wanted to scare us into trying to solve our problems before it became too late. However, I think we may already be too late to combat this--the point of no return. I mean, American's (at least) are extremely stuck in their ways of how they run their day to day lives. Think about it, how much do people complain if one of their exams is moved to a different day or if a friend cancels on a pre-planned date? A LOT. Thats because we hate change, especially when it is us that has to do the changing. Therefore, I don't think the trash in this movie really did anything to change the way American's carry out activities such as recycling.
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